To learn about the importance of trips, travel, and outdoor education in our curriculum, watch this interview with high school Humanities teacher Sage Chase-Dempsey or read the transcript below:
Researchers have noticed that risk-taking behaviors are on a decline across all areas in adolescence.
Risk lives in our program in the sense that we're asking students to be in the real world, and the real world has real risks. Whether that's something like being involved in cooking Community Lunch for eighty people and the risk is how much you season the soup, or something on a trip – choosing what direction to go in the lake, or getting on the wrong train or the wrong bus in a city – our program has all these risks built in in the sense that we want students to face real-world consequences and see how that feels.
When you're on a trip, if you're in a boat and you have to get across the lake, you can't stop it. If it gets windy, you can't turn the wind down, you can't turn the rain off. You have to get across the lake. There's not a Plan B. Those sorts of experiences in which students are in the real world and have to face these real-world problems are one of the most important parts of our outdoor education.
Students know that the circumstances they're in are real, and they can feel that. They bring a different level of themselves to an experience like that than they bring to a classroom discussion. And, ideally, outdoor ed also plays this role in which students might start to sense how real that trip on that boat was and then they bring that same attitude to their classroom discussion, or their algebra class, where we see this transference from the experience to the rest of their education.
Students will often discover that they have a strength that they didn't know about on a trip. Each person on a trip falls into a role that's really important – they're the caretakers, there are folks that are at the head of the pack, there are people that are carrying extra weight – and each role is invaluable. We need all of them in the class to make the trip work and we need all of them in the world to solve the problems we’re facing.
Students often leave our school and then become leaders in the different places that they end up. And I don't just mean leaders in the sense that they become bosses at their jobs; I mean students leave our school and they become the people that organize the pickup volleyball game in college, they become the people who start the book club at the library, they become the people who are behind the scenes in the dorms or in their house making sure the dishes get done and making sure that everyone feels okay. Our students are interested in keeping community flourishing.
People often say that education is preparation for life and I don't think that's true. I think education is life. Every moment of it is real, every moment at our school is real. It's real for me, certainly, this is my life! It's real for our students. So, I don't think we're really preparing students for the world; I think this is the world and we're just bringing it to them.
